Please go to the link before you read the rest of this blog:
Four Sought After Teen Seriously Injured
No matter how much I try to reconcile myself to the fact that we live in a world drowning in a vast ocean of its own sin, there are hours, or days, or weeks where I just can’t seem to do that. This is one of those weeks.
Wednesday night, right before services, a 16 year old girl named Lizette was shot at the park across the street from my church when an argument over a car between another group of teenagers boiled over into a gun fight. Some of the kids who attend Wednesday night may or may not have been witnesses.
My pastor went to visit Lizette’s family this afternoon. He prayed with them, and offered our church as a site for the memorial service. They told him two of the four involved in that shooting have been caught. From what my pastor said, they appeared to be handling what happened pretty well.
You’ll notice in the article I linked to that there isn’t much mention – it shares space with a shooting the next day just a few miles away which also involved a group of four and a fifth being shot. It’s worth noting that the neighborhood my church sits in the middle of has a lot of crime issues – gangs, drugs, illegal alien drop houses – and I guess that makes it less worthy of attention for that reason. I could spend five blog posts ranting about how frustrated it makes me to know that tragedies like this will get downplayed for these and other reasons and not even scratch the surface of that frustration. So I won’t write them. That won’t help anything. Fifteen years of directly and indirectly wrestling with the injustice has shown me that much.
What I can do to help is pray, and ask you to do the same this week.
Pray for Lizette’s family.
Pray for those involved with the shooting.
Pray for the neighborhood… that this will bring it together instead of continuing in its apathy.
Lastly, for my church family – that in the middle of this tragedy, God’s light will continue to shine brightly through us, and that God will give us opportunities like we’ve never had before to bring His healing to this area.
